Free Men (2011)

Absolutely amazing

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

FREE MEN is an attempt to add a multi-cultural element to the story of the French Resistance, by focusing on its North African component and (not entirely believably) suggesting it was a precursor to the later resistance struggle by Arabs against the French for Algerian independence. The plot is a classic as a self-interested Arab petty crook in Paris is caught by Vichy cops and forced to infiltrate the Resistance only to discover that their cause is worth fighting for. This allows for lots of cameos by historical figures like Salim Halali (an Arab Jewish singer and homosexual) and Si Kaddour Benghabrit (who ran the Paris mosque and helped Jews escape the Holocaust). Unfortunately the film lets itself down by being so one note; it identifies the Gestapo with the immigration police, ignores the use of North African bounty hunters by the Germans to catch Jews in return for cash, and features only one Arab who is anti-semitic and anti-homosexual...and who is (spoilers) a traitor anyway. Restoring a forgotten history is laudable, but ignoring its negative aspects is not. The film itself is cleanly shot and full of good actors, even if the small budget means that not much happens (which is probably quite realistic) and the script doesn't provide much for the actors to work with.

I would have rated this higher if it wasn't for the end of the movie. Not the part where the two characters see each other but after that which describes the true historical context.It was very disappointing to find out the main character we follow throughout the movie didn't exist. It was the two minor characters who were real people.With so much material for actual people and actual events from that era, I don't understand why you would make a movie where the real life people are supporting characters in minor roles. I much would have preferred the main character to have been real for, as I have stated, there are plenty to choose from.

I ignored IMDb's rating and just watched this hoping it'd be a good film. I was very disappointed. The story seemed interesting and it seemed at first as if it had many undertones and little stories and details—even a certain poetry—, but soon it was all simplified and followed a slow, distant rhythm like some sort of thriller and I started losing interest in the character and his situation.I could say most of the actors were great, especially Michael Lonsdale, but the rest, including Tahar Rahim, carried a considerable emotional weight throughout the movie, but merely on the surface; it didn't create deep connections with other characters or situations, and that's also how most scenes were. I can't help to blame the director and the script for all this. The photography was great and the art direction, as well, even when the color palette is extremely rehashed nowadays, because it wasn't distractive and helped create a certain atmosphere. I think the director wanted to create a very epic film—considering it was filmed in 10 weeks in France and Morocco—with a lot of tension and character development, but for some reason, everything ended up cut into bits of it and some under-layers of the story came to the surface and they became so explicit they appear as banal and forced, separating bit by bit from whatever was supposed to be the main truth of this film.It seemed like the movie was approached from the wrong angle and carried out with the wrong sensitivity and vision, because I fail to understand what it really was about and the concluding texts at the end only make me reinforce everything I have said since I almost didn't bother to read them. But it caught my attention the homage intention of them and it made me rethink of the whole movie again from that perspective. Unfortunately, I didn't find anything new and nothing appeared to have an extra value. If this was a movie about friendship or fighting for a cause, I don't understand why I didn't feel such weight, such connections, such struggle and such sacrifice, because, as I saw it, the characters weren't really risking anything or nothing that mattered to them anyway; when they tried to do noble acts, they looked more like they were just doing it for the hell of it as if they had nothing else better to do.Instead of seeing "Free Men" in this film, I saw empty men with no passion, no desire whatsoever for life. Stereotypes and victims with no will of their own.

FREE MEN was just screened to a sold-out crowd at the Rendez-vous with French Cinema in New York. It was a wonderfully acted, well told fictional film of Arabs helping resistance fighters (including North African Jews) during the German occupation of France during WW2.Dramatic and suspenseful, pitting collaborators versus resistance fighters, gestapo officials versus the authorities at a mosque.Given the ethnic tensions in Paris today, this film offers an alternate vision of unity in the face of oppression.Definitely worth seeing on the festival circuit or in art house release.